Bus:Stop Krumbach

An exhibition at the Vorarlberger Architektur Institut tells the story of the seven bus shelters carried out in the last twelve months by seven international architects in collaboration with regional partner architects and local skilled craftspeople.

What started with an unusual idea in Krumbach became reality this spring – the seven bus shelters designed by international architects and implemented in close collaboration with seven regional partner architects and local craftspeople have been erected and are “in use”.

With professional partners in the shape of the Architekturzentrum Wien and vai Vorarlberger Architektur Institut, the association Kultur Krumbach invited seven architects’ practices from all around the world to design seven new bus shelters for the village of Krumbach. All the architects gladly accepted the invitation to familiarise themselves with the Bregenzerwald and to design bus shelters for the region that has a public bus service that operates on an hourly basis. Their fee: a week’s holiday in the Bregenzerwald.

The geometric abstraction of the triangular form designed by Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu could have been made by Sol Lewitt. But at the centre of it was an irritation: a handyman had mounted a doorbell in this wall painting. Disrespectful. Dvvt bring together their impressions and influences to make an object precisely for this place. A poetic act of folding triangular surfaces. A narrative about the place, about Sol Lewitt and about the Alps – called “April”.

Sou Fujimoto’ concept for his BUS:STOP for Krumbach is a “wood” of thin, steel rods. In this open structure a staircase winds upwards. This BUS:STOP offers no protection against the weather, but instead opens up new dimensions in the perception of place, space and nature.

Smiljan Radic was clearly inspired by the handcraft and traditions in the Bregenzerwald. The result: a design with references to the Bregenzerwald house “parlour”. Radic transfers the intimacy to the exposed situation of a bus stop. A cut-out piece of “parlour” placed in the landscape, disengaged from the context of the interior. A precisely detailed glass pavilion with a coffered ceiling of black concrete. Rural wooden chairs are provided as seating. A bird-house provides a playful aspect that both attracts attention and provides distraction, at one and the same time.

Ensamble Studio were fascinated by the elementary quality of rough, untreated oak planks and they way they are stacked to dry in timber workshops in the Bregenzerwald. The challenge was to make this into a spatial situation for the BUS:STOP. Just by layering the rough planks, arranged and positioned in way that produced a space that was both protected and open. The architects regard it as most important that the oak planks should remain untreated, their smell and the process of ageing makes the place somewhere specific.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu from Hangzhou, China, addressed the special location of this BUS:STOP with an unobstructed view in both directions. They designed a camera obscura, a conical space that opens to the street and, with a window in the rear wall, frames the visual axis to the mountains. In this way they created a space with a special, focused perception of the landscape, which in all their projects is always more important than the buildings themselves.

Sami Rintala, Dagur Eggertsson and Vibeke Jenssen move along the boundaries between architecture, design and art. Their “objects” respond to the place with densification to create a special narrative. This is the background to their decision to use the tennis-court site. It was only here that they could augment the BUS:STOP with an additional social function. It is both a shelter for people waiting for the bus and a small, metaphorical, yet entirely functional, spectator stand for the tennis courts. Very reduced and traditional, timber-built, shingle-clad. The special aspect of the interpretation is the combination of need and possibility.

Glatzegg Bus Stop, Amateur Architecture Studio, Wang Shu | Lu Wenyu

Alexander Brodsky was confronted with a difficult site for his BUS:STOP. A small left-over area at the edge of a site occupied by a neat single-family house stands. But he reacts in a fundamental and sovereign way to this restriction and places a radically simple but precisely built wooden tower on the site. At the same time his tower has a striking archaic quality. Openings on all sides, glazed on three of them. And then there is the “first floor” with its small unglazed windows. Here the wind blows and birds can fly through. With a table and bench Alexander Brodsky provides a relaxed atmosphere to wait in, if the bus should happen to be late.

“The exhibition, like the whole project BUS:STOP Krumbach, is entirely the product of collaboration. It tells the history of the project and places it in the context of Vorarlberg’s regional development and in the international architecture scene. Important for both the project and the exhibition is the successful connection of infrastructure and mobility for the rural area”, explains Verena Konrad, Director of vai Vorarlberger Architektur Institut.